


permanence

by trell (qunlat)



Category: One Piece
Genre: Disfigurement, Gen, Permanent Injury, Post-Skypiea Arc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-28
Updated: 2014-05-28
Packaged: 2018-01-26 21:28:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1703171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qunlat/pseuds/trell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one walks away from a lightning strike unmarked.</p>
            </blockquote>





	permanence

He has scars after Skypiea, dark risen lines that run over his skin like tree branches, covering him from head to foot and afterward making him stop to stare every time he passes a mirror.

It’s permanent, Chopper says.

His ribs are also broken, _again_ , but Sanji’s gotten used to that. He’s found that broken ribs accompany almost everything important he’s ever managed in his life, a constant staple, and it’s almost a mark of pride to have the familiar shooting pains in his sides and chest.

The scars from Eneru’s lightning are different, their angry pattern on his skin a constant reminder of something he did to save someone else, something done for friends and not to save himself. _Save your own skin,_ that’s the expression, that’s what Sanji lives by because he doesn’t want to die; but he didn’t, not this time, and his skin is irreparably marred for the effort.

“It looks _so cool,_ ” Luffy tells him, the moment Chopper takes off Sanji’s bandages, his strange little fur-covered hands careful and steady. “Now you’re a proper pirate, with scars, like me and Zoro! And they look like what caused them.”

“Like lightning,” Sanji murmurs, and stares at himself in the mirror Nami proffers from where she’s sitting, elbows on her knees and chin propped on one hand. 

The hideous lines are etched down past his eye, across his open patch of forehead in between where his hair hangs limp and dirty over the side of his face. “Robin has them, too,” Chopper tells him quietly, “and Zoro and Usopp, though theirs are not as bad.”

“You got the worst of it, saving us from Eneru,” says Nami, and adds, her voice a little off, expression strange, “thanks—thanks for doing that.”

“You’re welcome,” says Sanji, and lies back down on his pillows, lets Chopper finish tending to the burns that still remain. He hurts all over, even now, and he mostly wants to sleep.

They leave him alone with the reindeer, who says little—sensing Sanji’s pensiveness, maybe, he’s part-animal and animals are supposed to be perceptive—and he falls asleep to the sound of Chopper’s plinking footsteps, dreams of lightning strikes and thunder.

*

Robin is there when he wakes up, and he sees instantly that what Chopper said was true: a splash of disfiguring, risen marks criss-cross her face, all stemming from a spot etched like a star onto her forehead. Branches run down her neck and shoulders from it, the skin twisted.

“Robin,” Sanji says, horrified at what this means, at the hit she must have taken.

Her expression is as calm as ever, a placid lake hiding serpents in dark water. She smiles at him, faint, just a lifting at the edges of her mouth—marked too, her lips ruined, no longer shapely but pockmarked and burned. She says, “We match.”

Sanji thinks of electricity coursing through his entire body, of shock and fire and pain so absolute he doesn’t know what devil must have possessed him to keep him standing after. It makes him shudder to remember it, and it’s strange and awful to know that Robin’s been there, too.

“We do,” he says, and doesn’t rise from bed, his burns still aching, Chopper nowhere to be found but his medicines sitting on a crate nearby. The state they have been left in suggests only a brief absence, and Sanji hopes that means there are more painkillers in his future.

Robin reads in the corner while he rests further, silent.

*

“Maybe they’ll call us the Scarface pirates instead of the Strawhats,” Luffy says over dinner—prepared by Usopp and held on the floor for Sanji’s benefit, rather than at the table. Usopp’s cooking isn’t great, but more than passable, and right now Sanji can’t even sit up without a grimace, much less stand over a stove.

Zoro, sitting crosslegged at Luffy’s side, rolls his eyes and makes a face. Sanji can see the scars on his arms and crawling up his neck, but his face isn’t touched by them, not like Sanji’s or Robin’s. Just another scar in his collection, like his chest and like his ankles, like a dozen other places he’s been cut.

Usopp’s lightning marks are harder still to see, but he pulls open his shirt to show them, and the Strawhats laugh and congratulate him, led (of course) by Luffy. 

Luffy thinks all of them look brilliant, seems disappointed not to have scars of his own, because of course rubber doesn’t _do_ that. Sanji finds his frank appreciation and total inability to cringe away from anything refreshing, and that’s Luffy in a nutshell any day, _refreshing_ : he’s honest and he’s open, his face plain as day for anyone to read, and there’s no horror there, just delight at their new oddity.

Sanji sees the looks that Nami and Usopp cast him when they think he isn’t looking, though, pitying and guilty, and he wishes blankly that they’d stop.

It’s not as though his job to look good: just to cook and kill, the latter in the name of friends if only sometimes in the name of justice.

*

Nami is uncharacteristically nice to him for weeks. Sanji’s always wanted her to like him, but not like this, not out of some odd penance.

It’s Luffy that points her behavior out, oblivious as ever, which gets her to stop at last. Sanji is glad for it, and glad not to have to say a word.

He wants to write a letter to the old geezer—maybe snap a picture of himself with Usopp’s juddery camera and send it along with an albatross that may or may not make it out of the Grand Line—but Sanji writes only very poorly, only enough to note down recipes, and he doesn’t want to dictate what he’s thinking to anyone else on the crew.

It’s strangely personal, for all that the scars are there for all to see.

Chopper, he decides at last, might be sufficiently confidential. It takes him another week, but he finally works up to asking, and the reindeer draws the letter up for him with only one pause, to ask if Sanji really talks to his father that way—to which Sanji answers only, “He’s not my father,” finding this easier to say than explaining that the way he and Zeff talk to each other isn’t as simple as the words themselves.

In the end he sends the note together with a blurry picture of himself (grinning crookedly, cigarette in his teeth, how else?) and another of all the members of the crew while they’re spaced out on the deck, candid, taken when he leans out the doorway of the common room.

*

_Hey, old geezer,_ reads the scrap of paper that makes its way over the Calm Belt in the carrier bag of an albatross, _took a risk for the good people and lost something for it. Just like you, right? Now we match._

_P.S. I hope you haven’t let Carne make the souffle._

*

People stare at him and Robin in the next town they visit. They go looking for supplies in the bazaar together while Nami and Luffy and Zoro scout a nearby bar, and Usopp and Chopper stay on the ship; it never occurs to Sanji what a sight they must make together.

Apart, they’re an oddity: together, he feels like he’s in a circus sideshow, people pointing and whispering to each other when they pass.

He focuses on checking the freshness of the food in the stands, Robin looking out over the busy bazaar beside him, forces himself not to listen to anyone in earshot. He tests how firm the vegetables are, how long they can be stored, makes sure the fish is cold enough despite lying out for the whole morning.

The shopkeep avoids meeting his gaze while Sanji pays him, and keeps sneaking glances at Robin, whose jet black hair now frames an imperfect face, its harsh lines all the more striking for the scars. Sanji doesn’t bother to haggle.

“Sorry,” he says to Robin as they walk away, bags slung over their shoulders, a lit cigarette hanging out of his mouth to soothe his fraying nerves. “I didn’t think, when I asked you to come.”

“I did,” Robin says, soft enough that he hardly hears her over the sound of the city. “It’s all right.”

*

But among the other Strawhats it’s a mark of belonging, same as the broken ribs; the firm knowledge that they’d do the same for him, that Usopp came _back_ for him, even though he was terrified and powerless against Eneru.

Robin and he are closer for it, because it’s something they share that none of the others have, even with their own marks of battle. “A souvenir of the islands in the sky,” Robin says once to someone that asks, and Sanji thinks of it that way, too.

Life carries on, as it always has, and if Sanji stops sometimes by windows to look at the now-familiar pattern over his nose and past his eye and across his neck, remembering what he looked like before, it's the friends at his back that stand out most in the reflection.


End file.
